The story of O

Outside the hotel, Wilson was not even out from under the awning when the first woman stopped him. “Oh, I love you,” she said. “I just love you.” She gave him a hug and said, “You’re great. Thank you for your work.”

“Thank you for your work?” I exclaimed as we walked toward Gramercy Park. “You call that work?”

“What about my work?” Wilson looked at me to see if I was joking. I guess I was joking.

All the way down Third Avenue, this scene was enacted again and again by men and women of all ages. Wilson was unfailingly polite, even gallant, while I walked around in circles cursing softly.

By the time we reached the East Village, it felt as though half the city were O.’s buddies. And as for me, it was like old times again, back in the Abbey in Rome. It occurred to me that one constant in all of Wilson’s films, with or without Anderson, is that he’s somebody’s buddy. Having found his vocation in a friendship, he has made friendship — at least the feeling of it — the constant in his career.

Months later, when I read the unfathomable news that Wilson had been hospitalized after a drug-related suicide attempt, I was sorry I’d said that about his work. He had made it seem easy to be O. But now I wondered if I knew him at all. Maybe I was just another person projecting buddydom on him. I had never noticed any signs of hard drug abuse — and certainly never pictured him strung out among the film industry’s notorious users. I hated to admit it: We weren’t the friends I thought we were.

Coming of age in Texas and then being plunged straight into a life where everyone on the street is your friend must be deeply disorienting. I had been thinking about how neatly O.’s vocation had sprung from his youth with Wes, but now I saw that the meaning of friendship is easily blurred at this exaggerated level — and that if that anchor gets loose, maybe everything else goes too. I also felt for Anderson, who must have had to endure a lot. It’s easy to speculate that the cinematic crash-and-burns that O.’s characters are put through in Anderson’s films can be seen as a reflection of O.’s off-screen life. Though there are plenty of revelations coming out about his problems, I keep looking for my own clues.

A few instances have been badgering me. Just before our first interview, O. called to say that “food poisoning” had caused him to postpone this magazine’s photo shoot, so he had to cancel on me as well. And now, after reading that he had gone to church in Santa Monica the night before he lost control, I wish I’d paid more attention to a stray comment he made in the East Village. Passing a looming church, that evening last June, he asked if it was Catholic. Joking, I said, “You want to go to confession?’ He said, not joking, “Well, maybe a little prayer.”

Read the full story — including the author's personal observations of Owen Wilson before his personal crisis — on mensvogue.com.

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